Jean Stubbs
Jean Stubbs's many novels include Family Games, Kelly
Park, Light in Summer, and Like We Used to Be.
She has lived for more than twenty years in a cottage in Cornwall,
England, with her husband.

After seven years of happy marriage, Imogen Lacey's husband dies
tragically in a traffic accident. Still grieving, Imogen renews
acquaintance with an old friend, Alice Brakespear, who whisks
Imogen off for a visit to Langesby, the North Country town where
Alice's husband Hal is vicar of St. Oswald's church. There, Imogen
discovers a mysterious circle of standing stones, and, touched by
some primal power she can't explain, regains the determination to
get on with her life. She settles in nearby Haraldstone, where she
opens a shop to sell the extravagant hats she designs, and becomes
friendly with the local crafts people, all of them women, and all --
it turns out -- witches.

Caught between her fascination for the witches' rituals and the
pressures of the more conventional world of the Brakespears, Imogen
agrees to act in an extraordinary production of an Elizabethan
play which is being mounted to generate funds for St. Oswald's.
The play is masterminded by the genial yet secretive Dr. Timothy
Rowley, who, it quickly becomes clear, has his own mysterious
agenda. In fact, all the people with whom Imogen is now involved
are more than they seem: her leading man, Philip Gregory, director
of a local home for youthful offenders; his one-time lover, Edith
Wyse, who focuses her jealous malice on Imogen; and Mary Proctor,
nurse and midwife, descendant of a long line of witches and said to
be one herself. As the play moves closer to performance, tensions
escalate between the players, and strange and sinister events warn
that evil, in the form of sorcery much blacker than the magic
Imogen has been dabbling in, is afoot.

The Witching Time takes that most quintessentially English
plot setting, of a church parish and its vicar, and grafts onto it a
tale of witchcraft and supernatural evil. It's an interesting
amalgamation that might have worked better if the novel were either
darker or more satirical. But, while Stubbs has an acute eye for
the frailties of human nature (particularly the unwitting damage
that can be done by thoroughly good people), characters and events
are presented with barely a whiff of irony. And the evil, despite
some contemporary trappings, ultimately boils down to a very
English game of small-town social one-upmanship, putting me more in
mind of Barbara Pym than Stephen King.

Essentially, this is light fiction. It touches on weighty themes
but shies away from exploring them in depth, and is much more at
home in the drawing room than on the heath. Philip, the magnetic
villain, is by far the least convincing character, and his cohort
Edith comes across as more of a social bully than the icy horror
she is meant to be. By contrast, the white witches of Haraldstone
are so nice as to be positively bland: a bunch of craft-making,
Goddess-revering, New Age gals who like to shuck off their clothes
and dance naked in the moonlight, but are basically just good
neighbors. Stubbs's opening acknowledgments credit, among other
books, Women Who Run with the Wolves; her witches, however,
seem more likely to run with the Shelties.

Still, if you don't ask too much of it, The Witching Time is
a diverting read. Stubbs has a graceful storytelling style and
most of her characterizations are very sharp, with a nice
appreciation for the ambiguities of human nature and the way people
injure each other without meaning to. These edgy relationships are
the best thing in the book, and keep the reader engaged long after
the thinness of the supernatural element has ceased to please.

Victoria Strauss is a novelist, and a lifelong reader of fantasy and science fiction. Her
most recent fantasy novel, The Arm of the Stone, is currently available
from Avon Eos. For an excerpt, visit her website.